


Lunch Boxes

by qthelights



Category: West Wing
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2001-07-05
Updated: 2001-07-05
Packaged: 2017-10-30 15:34:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,260
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/333277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qthelights/pseuds/qthelights
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>My first fandom and the purple prose that goes with such a thing.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Lunch Boxes

**Author's Note:**

> My first fandom and the purple prose that goes with such a thing.

I’m checking through the lunch that the take-out boy brought. Fries, two hamburgers and a salad. The fries and salad are shared food. Well, they will be. And a hamburger each for Josh and I. His looks suitably burnt I think, rolling my eyes though there’s no one around to see me do it. 

I’m also wondering what it must be like to be a take-out boy that delivers to the White House. I guess it would beat just some ordinary fast food job. Delivering to the President versus delivering to ordinary people. I know what I would choose. Something to brag to my friends about anyway.

Not that the President actually gets take away food.

At least I don’t think he would.

There’s probably some rule against the President consuming potentially bad food.

Not so for the rest of us though, I think as I take up the food and head to Josh’s office. The door is partially open and I know he isn’t working anyway. There’s a report Leo asked him to do, that he thinks is totally beneath him, so I’m pretty sure that he’ll be avoiding it.

Sure enough, when I enter the room Josh is sitting back in his chair, feet up on the desk and flipping through a glossy magazine that looks suspiciously girly. It certainly isn’t Leo’s report anyway.

“Josh?” He looks up, nods at me, nods at the food, and gives a little grunt of recognition before going straight back to the magazine.

Well, don’t I feel loved.

And in defense of the food, I’m sure it feels the same.

However, this is not an entirely new occurrence to me, (though I can’t speak for the cuisine), and I simply ignore his rudeness. Setting the food on the table and settling into a chair in front of his desk I take my hamburger and unwrap it, savoring the great smell that wafts from it to my nose.

“Watcha reading?” I ask Josh who is still looking at the magazine. Taking a bite of the aforementioned hamburger, I wait for him to answer me.

“Magazine,” he grunts as if he’s actually telling me something.

“Right, and what are you reading in it that is so important that you can’t pay attention to your overworked, yet ravishingly beautiful, assistant?”

Bite. Bite. Yum.

He finally looks up at me. I continue to chew steadily.

Closing the magazine and tossing it onto the pile of crap he likes to think of as his desk, and reaching for his own hamburger, he smirks, “Some horribly written article on what the average American would and would not do in bed, if you can believe it.”

“With you, Josh, I wouldn’t doubt it.”

“Yeah, you probably wouldn’t. Where are the fries?”

I point to them, sitting in front of him on the desk.

“Oh.”

I nod, “Yeah, ‘oh’. It has become so engrained in your head that you need me to help you find things that you don’t even bother looking anymore. Admit it.”

He grins and takes a bite of his own, now unwrapped, hamburger. “I’ll admit no such thing,” he smirks after swallowing, “I was just momentarily distracted by the images of all the things one can actually do in bed these days.”

I’ll take the bait.

“Such as?”

He continues as if he didn’t hear me ask, “Actually, I was more distracted by the fact that they can write about all of those things in a magazine that one can buy in a shop without I.D.”

“Such as?” I simply repeat my question, eventually he’ll hear it.

Bite. Chew. Swallow.

Josh does the same before continuing. “Lot’s of stuff, they give a whole list going from normal stuff down to more, ah, extreme stuff.”

“And they ask whether or not you’d do them?”

He nods. “Yup, you get to tick boxes and all.”

“And did you tick them, Josh?”

What? I’m curious!

“Nope, Donna. I, unlike the other readers of this magazine apparently, can remember what I would and wouldn’t do.”

He pauses and then adds, “And if I couldn’t I certainly wouldn’t be rushing to fish the thing out from between the couch cushions whilst in the throes of passion.”

I shift awkwardly in my chair.

Josh saying the words ‘throes of passion’…

Grabbing a couple of fries, I pop them into my mouth to give me a second to… well I don’t want to say ‘recover’… but yeah… recover…

Swallowing, “So how many hypothetical boxes would you have gotten to tick?”

“About two thirds I’d say… maybe a little less. There’s some weird things in here.”

“Can I do it?”

Josh regards me with the look of a four-year-old, “No. Get your own copy.”

“Huh…why?” I ask wonderingly.

Josh looks kind of funny now, “Because,” he pouts.

“Ah.”

“ ‘Ah’ what, Donna?” he says knowing I’m thinking something he won’t like.

“Ah, you ticked the ones you’d do,” I grin.

“I did not!”

“Then why won’t you let me look at the magazine, Joshua?” I quip.

“Because!”

“What are you, *four*, Josh?” I laughingly ask.

He grumbles something under his breath. “I just wouldn’t want you to be offended by some of the things they suggest in here, Donna. That’s all. I’m looking out for your wellbeing.”

Like hell he is.

He ticked the boxes.

I’m grinning like an idiot now.

Josh has got this delightful blush creeping into his cheeks now, its funny, I don’t think I’ve ever seen him blush before. It’s cute.

“Well then, why don’t you read out the ones you think my delicate ears can cope with,” I say thinking this is going to be fun, and that I’m going to enjoy the hell out of it.

Josh has apparently decided to pretend he’s not embarrassed and grumbles a clipped ‘Fine’.

He finishes the last bite of his hamburger and picks up the magazine again. I open up the salad and start picking out the bits I want to eat and leaving the rest for Josh. Eventually he finds the right page.

I notice he carefully shields the pages from me.

What a Dork.

“Section One, Basic Fun. First things first, would you kiss someone?” he scoffs as he reads.

“Have, so Yes” I answer, knowing we both know that one. “And I object to your tone Joshua, I don’t believe you’ve ever seen me kiss anyone so you can’t positively say that I have.”

He smirks, “Donna if you haven’t kissed someone then we have bigger things to…”

“Joshua,” I cut him off, “Continue the questions.”

“Would you have sex with someone?”

“Yes,” I answer, perhaps a little too firmly. He did only say ‘someone’ right?

“Would you have sex with someone you’d only met once?” he continues.

I think a second, “Probably, if the person had a really good vibe…and the situation felt really comfortable.”

Josh snorts, “I’m sure the situation would feel comfortable enough by the time you needed to decide anything…”

“Josh!” I reprimand again.

“Yeah okay, okay… keep your panties on,” he says and stops suddenly as the words fly out of his mouth. He then turns red. “Uh…I mean…”

“Yes, Josh?” I ask, amused.

“Um, nevermind.”

Grinning I add, “But if I kept my panties on Josh then you wouldn’t get any more in the mail.”

His jaw drops.

I’ve never seen anyone’s jaw actually drop. I mean other than movies and cartoons and stuff. It’s doubly funny in real life I can now tell you.

“Donna!” he squeaks.

“Yes, Josh?”

“Um… nevermind,” he says for the second time. He clears his throat rather obviously and goes back to the questions. Presumably in an attempt to sidetrack us from his embarrassment. “Three, would you sleep with a co-worker?”

Okay, now we’re both embarrassed.

I try to fight back the flush in my cheeks and answer calmly. “Well, um, yes. I mean,” I say so there can be no confusion as to the fact that I’m not talking about Josh, “Toby is pretty hot…sometimes a girl just can’t stop herself from thinking about…”

“Donna!”

I laugh out loud at the pitch of his voice. But I am absolutely not going to ask him again what he’s worked up about, we’d be here forever with his ‘nevermind’s.

“C’mon Josh, just ask them quicker, our lunch break will be over soon!” And of course, the further we get away from the co-worker questions the better.

“Okay, well I’ll skip over the next couple of questions, they’re pretty, well, ‘basic’, like they said. So,” he pauses as he finds the next question to ask, “Section Two, Self-Happiness and Pleasing Others.”

He’s leering.

“Question 11, would you ever please yourself?”

Okay, why did I ask him to ask me these questions again?

“Of course,” I answer firmly, trying not to let him know I’m a little embarrassed.

Josh’s leer gets bigger.

“Really?”

“Josh that isn’t one of the questions.”

He grins, “Nope, that was mine.”

“Well, yes, really. Now next question.”

“Would you masturbate a member of the opposite sex?”

“Yes,” I continue my confident charade.

“Would you masturbate a member of the same sex?”

“Um, maybe,” I answer truthfully.

“Really?” he asks again. This Josh-is-a-broken-record thing is getting really old.

“Yes!” I exclaim, impatiently. Well, impatience and slight embarrassment.

“Hmm,” Josh sort of murmurs and then he coughs, seemingly breaking away from his own thoughts.

And gee, I wonder what those thoughts might be.

Josh suddenly moves his legs off the desk where they were lounging and tucks them back down underneath the desk.

Hmmm…….

“Would you let a member of the opposite sex masturbate you?” He questions, and I swear his voice sounds funny.

“Yep.”

“Would you let a member of the same sex masturbate you?”

“Again, a maybe.”

“Would you perform oral sex on your partner?”

“Yep,” I answer.

“Would you let your partner perform oral sex on you?”

“Well of course, duh,” I answer with a scoffing tone before I can think about it, “Uh, I mean, yeah.”

“ ‘Kay,” Josh sounds like he has a lump in his throat, “Would you watch pornography with your partner?” he continues.

“Sure.”

“Would you videotape you and your partner having sex?”

“No.”

“No, Donna?”

“Well would you, Josh? Imagine if someone got hold of the tape! Not to mention how much people don’t look like they think they do on video. I’d probably have a heart attack at how ugly I looked or something.”

“You couldn’t look ugly, Donna,” he says and I almost don’t notice it.

I smile, “Well you’re biased, because you couldn’t function without me, but thanks, Josh.”

“Don’t mention it,” he mutters, clearly embarrassed he said what he did.

Men.

Makes me laugh.

I’m still smiling though, “So what else is on that list Josh?”

“Um, well mainly a lot of fairly generic questions. Then some kind of, more extreme, things.”

“Like what?” I query.

“Well, lets see. There’s some stuff on role playing, blindfolds, bondage stuff… um something about clothespins that really kind of scares me… Oh, and some um… water sports.”

“Huh? What does that mean?” I ask genuinely confused.

“What does what mean?”

“The water sport thing.”

“Um…” Josh says.

“What?” I laugh.

“Well it kind of involves…” he trails off again making me very curious.

“What, Josh…I mean you just said the clothespins are what scared you… how bad can it be?” I laugh.

His cheeks are flushed again, and I really want to know what he’s talking about.

“Um, well, it involves…urine.”

“Urine?” I say incredulously.

“Yes Donna, ‘urine’ as in…as in, ‘pee’,” he says flustered.

Okay. Now it’s my turn to blush, and I do so. Badly.

“Oh,” I manage to squeak out.

“Yeah.”

“Um, well I think, not even needing to know anything other than that, that I can say I wouldn’t do any of, um, …that,” I say.

“Good,” Josh answers strangely.

“Good?” I question.

“Uh, I mean, its good that you know what you want and don’t want… yeah.”

“Ah…right. Yeah, I agree.”

This is so awkward.

I try a last ditch effort to steer the conversation to safer waters. Okay ‘waters’ was a bad metaphor for this situation.

“Is that all that’s in the article then?”

“Yeah, well, there’s a few other things, but mostly along the lines of what I asked you anyway.”

“I see.”

I have to get out of here.

Josh’s office suddenly seems really small.

“Well, I think I’d better get back to…”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll come back later and see if you need anything k?”

“Yep, that’s fine. And I’ll probably just call anyway if I, you know, need you.”

“Alright.”

“Oh and Donna?”

“Yes?” I ask nervously.

“You can throw out the salad. You picked out all the good bits anyway.”

I laugh, a little of the tension in the room leaving.

“Okay, Josh.”

He gives me a grin and starts busily shifting the papers around on his table like he’s looking for something. He’s really not though. He only has Leo’s report to do, and he still won’t do it yet.

It’s not until I’m back at the safety of my own desk, trying to ignore the dampness I can feel seeping into my underwear, that I realise I never found out Josh’s answers to those questions.

Not that I really want to know or anything.

Though maybe, for curiosity’s sake, I could sneak back into his office later and…

‘And’? what am I thinking?!

Grrr.

Damn lunch boxes.


End file.
